High-tech Future In Short Supply At Video Convention

Cyberspace. Virtual Reality. Interactive television. Amid the frenzy of future-speak we wade through every day, it's easy to lose sight of the future's essential trait: It isn't here yet.

It's a truth that was brought home at, of all places, last week's Video Software Dealers Association convention at the Dallas Convention Center.

Standing on the brink of Hollywood's summer of techno-wonder daydreams - Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, Hackers - it can seem like we are about to swoop into some thrilling Tomorrowland where we will live out every Jetsons-style fantasy. But walking through the convention's exhibit floor, it more often felt like tomorrow was never going to get here. Or rather that when it did get here, it was going to be pretty much just like today, which of course by then will be yesterday.

To begin with, it wasn't the future that most of the 9,000 attendees seemed eager to catch a glimpse of; it was the celebrities and the giveaways.

It's one thing when celebrity fever has people lining up to get the autograph of Tom Berenger, or even Burt Reynolds. But what explains the phenomenon that has people lining up to receive an autograph from Dan Haggerty (the Grizzly Adams guy), who was on hand to promote his "new" video, Grizzly Mountain?

By the end of the convention, you were hard-pressed to think of something that people wouldn't line up for. T-shirts, posters, key-chains, stickers, candy - promotional-goodies giveaways are the other convention payoff pursued by many attendees.

"This is what I come for," said Tony Morgan, a video retailer from Phoenix carrying three different bags bulging with giveaway loot.

As for the future, it was in short supply. At exhibits by electronic game-makers such as Sega and Nintendo, the interactive revolution and the blurring of movies and games seems to have thus far achieved nothing more than lengthening the cast and credits of a game.

On a game such as Surgical Strike (a post-apocalyptic jet-fighter combat game), the credits read like a movie production, listing among others executive producer, producers, screenwriters and, of course, director. But at least the credits gave you something to read as the grainy video sequences of people shouting and things blowing up scrolled by.

Nintendo didn't even have its newest system exhibited, so the closest you got to the future was Virtual Boy, a game in which virtual reality amounts to a couple of stick-figure boxers punching it out in a black-and-red world.